Tuesday, July 9, 2013

FAQ

My game has apparently reached some sort of critical mass,
and I’m beginning to get a lot of the same questions over and over again, so I’ll
address them here.

1) Online multiplayer?

No. I’m not going to
update this game to support online multiplayer.
The answer is a little complicated.

When I started making this game, I was targeting the Xbox
Live Indie Games platform, and just making a somewhat experimental, hobbyist
game. I had no idea that it would be as
successful as it would eventually become.
I figured I’d be lucky to sell a few hundred copies. So I didn’t anticipate a big player base,
which is kind of necessary for an online game, if people want to just jump
online at a random time to play.

But making an online game is HARD. Really hard.
Anyone who tells you otherwise has never done it before. It really would have made the coding 100x
more complicated, and perhaps is even beyond my technical ability. Because of those reasons, I led with a
local-multiplayer-only approach.

In that decision, I made some specific design decisions that
centered around the game being on a shared screen. Obviously, there is no indicator about which
player is controlling which character.
This was necessary (for obvious reasons), but also has turned into a
core gameplay feature. People who are
better at recognizing and finding their character early have an advantage in
the game.

But the nail in the coffin, and what I haven’t been
convinced of otherwise, is that the vast bulk of the FUN of the game is specifically
BECAUSE it’s played in a shared space with friends and family. It simply wouldn’t be as good of a game if it
was played by individual players in their own little rooms. Maybe if all the players had headsets, it
might work, but I simply think there is some magic in the room when the game is
played that wouldn’t translate into an online space.

This doesn’t preclude me from attempting to make a similar
online game in the future, or even taking individual game modes and trying to
make them online. But I have no plans to
update this specific game to include online multiplayer, for reasons technical,
design, and philosophical.

2) Bring this game to
(PSN/Wii/etc)!

That’s really more of a demand than a question, but
whatever. Here’s the thing. I’m a hobbyist game developer. This means that I have a real-life job, and
not a whole lot of time on my hands. It
also means that I’m doing game stuff for fun, rather than profit (though I like
profit!)

I will bring the game to any console that makes it easy for
me to do so. For example, Microsoft
allows us to pay them $99, and all of a sudden we’re game developers. You can make a game and put it on their
marketplace (as long as you follow a few simple rules). Recently, the Ouya console came out, and they
were even easier, allowing me to publish on their marketplace for free. PC, obviously, has many free outlets for
distributing amateur games.

So the game exists on those markets: XBLIG, Ouya, and Windows.

I looked at the signup page for PlayStation to become a
registered Sony Indie dev, and they wanted me to submit a 6-12 month business
plan. That was enough to scare me away.

Xbox One doesn’t appear to have a XBLIG analog, so I’m not
sure if the game will be available for that system or not. We’ll just have to see how they decide to
treat hobbyist devs.

3) Why is the game
not available in my country?

I’m not sure I understand the reasoning behind it, but Xbox
Live Indie Games are only available in certain countries, and blocked from
other countries. I think part of the
reason is that the games are unrated, and some governments don’t allow
that. But it’s not up to me.

You can always try the Windows version, but it’s still local
multiplayer only, and requires Xbox-compatible controllers.